Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

I paw the door open and edge into the cool dark, my pads shrinking at first from the chill patio stones. The full moon is beaming over the silhouette of the Circle Ritz's one, rather shabby palm tree. I do not know if the midnight hour has arrived yet, but I know where I am heading.

I leap upon the rail, inhale a lungful of dry, cold air and sail onto the palm's bent old back.

Then I am running under the light of the moon, down, down into the shadows that know me as well as their darkest deeds. The night is mine to make of it what I will, and that will be a mad dash to the place where my lovely roommate and her landlady play with spirits. If anything like the Sublime Karma is abroad tonight, they are in for the surprise of their lives, and I must be there.

Landmarks rush by in the wind of my passing. Evil-doers everywhere, watch out! I am free again, free! Free to be feline.

Chapter 12

Temples Doesn't Give a Rap

In theatrical circles, a green room is where performers meet before the show begins.

So Temple found it appropriate that the stance cast should meet privately before gathering in the glass room to make a spectacle of themselves.

She hadn't counted, however, on the likely location of a green room in a haunted house.

This one was inappropriately painted blood-red, and it served as the haunted house's staff kitchen.

Temple tried to relax while various fiends, phantoms, ghouls and demons, not to mention overtly dead people, wandered in and out munching on slices of cold pizza and guzzling cola drinks.

To watch Walking Rot nibble on long-cold sausage and pepperoni peeping greasily from under a winding sheet of congealed mozzarella was enough to turn her stomach.

No one else seemed to notice the unappetizing juxtaposition, mainly because the gathered psychics were so uninterested in anyone else besides themselves.

"I hope the seance area isn't as tawdry as the kitchen," an imperious female voice was complaining.

"You would have thought," came another woman's petulant whisper, "that the organizers would have provided some decent refreshments for us as well as for the resident ghouls."

"Maybe we are the food for the resident ghouls," a man answered with a brusque laugh.

"Don't be gruesome, Professor Mangel," another woman chided. "Houdini is hardly a ghoul."

"But wouldn't Houdini consider us little better than a motley bunch of grave-robbers?"

asked a woman whose face was hidden by a mammoth picture hat--black, with veiling of the same sober hue. "Is there one of us present that he wouldn't dismiss as a rampant fraud, were he alive? What makes any of us think he'll show up in person, instead of just showing us up as latter-day bawds and humbugs? In life, he often went in disguise among such gatherings to get the goods on the mediums."

"We are professionals!" the first woman--whose flowing silver-gray mane of hair rivaled any hat, however dramatic--said haughtily. "We aren't even requesting remuneration for this sitting."

"Ain't that a pity?" someone muttered.

She went on unflustered. "Houdini would be in bad faith if he showed up in disguise.

Besides, we are psychics. Wouldn't we sense a ringer in our midst?"

The silence that met this question proved that several psychics present harbored secret doubts about the others' abilities and intentions.

Temple whispered uneasily to Electra, "Methinks these crystal-gazers don't see much future in each other, or this seance."

"What a prime group!" Electra's admiration was oblivious. "You are gazing upon the cream of the West Coast clairvoyants."

"They look like the cousins of the Addams family, except for that woman in the denim."

"D'Arlene Hendrix. She's often assisted the police in finding dead bodies. She says she's just a housewife who senses things."

Temple no more believed in "just a housewife" than she did in messages from dead victims.

But D'Arlene Hendrix sat sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup at the large empty wooden table.

In her hand-painted T-shirt and denims, she looked as normal as apple pie, her metal-framed bifocals on a pearlized string and her serviceable watchband cutting into her plump wrist.

"That one over there is Mynah Sigmund," Electra whispered as if in church.

"The Woman in White' act?"

Electra's wide eyes rebuked. "She says she is a white witch and can dowse for water, read health or sickness in people's auras and commune with Indian spirits. Guess I should say 'Native American' now."

Temple reevaluated the Sigmund woman in view of Electra's advertisement. She was tall, her thick cascade of silver-gray hair as sculpted as a frozen waterfall, though she was not yet forty. She wore white as if color were a curse: long, flowing gown, probably stretch polyester.

Moonstones glowed in silver jewelry, an elaborate necklace and a ring-bracelet that linked the fingers of one hand to her wrist with a web of fine silver chains. Sarah Bernhardt had commissioned Rene Lalique to make a similar piece with a richly enameled serpent motif.

Temple had often admired photos of this mock-decadent theatrical trinket. Mynah--after the black bird that spoke; could that be an original name?--needed no blatant snake designs on her jewelry. Her entire figure and its calculated presentation spoke of sinuous manipulations of both the corporeal and spectral variety, Temple thought, bet your best albino snakeskin boots!

Maybe that was why the men in the room clustered around her. Clever, Temple thought, to play upon white instead of the dramatic black. Aimee Semple McPherson, the meteoric evangelist of Harry Houdini's time, had played the same cynical contrast of light and darkness with spectacular success.

"Temple, I get very negative female vibes from you." Electra frowned. "You don't like Mynah Sigmund on sight."

"I don't trust her on sight; there's a difference."

"She is considered tops in her area."

"Don't doubt it. What about the short dumpy woman with the ridiculous hat?"

"Never seen her before. Must be from L. A. But the nice-looking man is Oscar Grant, the television narrator for Dead Zones ."

"Perfect." Temple sighed dramatically, eyeing a director's dream man for the part of "A Prominent Occultist."

Oscar Grant, somewhere vague between thirty and fifty, was engaged in brushing back his curly dark hair, which tumbled to his shoulders like midnight on a roll, a dramatic white streak zigzagging like a lightning bolt from his left temple to the very ends. He wore plain black, of course, rather in the Max mode: silky black shirt, expensive noir slacks, sleek patent-leather Italian loafers that ran about six hundred dollars. A braided leather belt circled his narrow waist and a similar braided leather neckband ended with a large silver or pewter charm of cryptic design.

He was talking intensely to the dumpy but eccentric woman, whose deeply brimmed Edward Gorey hat trailed awkward bunches of veiling and black silk flowers.

She nodded, or rather the hat did. And lucky that she wore it, for glimpses showed a late-middle-aged face that was full, frowsy and far too emphatic to be considered attractive.

"What about 'mine host'?" When Electric looked blank, Temple tried to be more descriptive and had a tough time coming up with specifics. "The guy in black polyester." Electra's mystified expression remained. "The guy who shops at Big and Tall, who led us up here."

"Oh. That's Mynah's husband."

"Oh! Really, the White Witch is married to him? What does he do?"

"Nothing interesting. Works in an office somewhere. Hangs around. Mynah doesn't seem to take him seriously."

"I consider that an interesting situation. What's his name?"

A frown temporarily closed down Electra's normally open features. "You know, I don't know.